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Thursday, 17 November 2011

Gov 2.0 Conference - Canberra October 2011

A bit of background: Gov 2.0 (Government + web
2.0) is all about Government moving towards a more transparent, open culture. A
recent taskforce made several recommendations – most of which the Australian
Government agreed to. This has led to a drive towards increased engagement with
the public: seeking input to agency policy and strategy, uptake of social
media (or web 2.0 technologies) by agencies to help support this and increased
openness and sharing of Government information/data and processes.

My summary of some of the slides and presentations:

·Nicholas Skytland, Director - Open Government Initiative, NASA
– amazing!!! Great presenter, he and the team have created a culture of
innovation and collaboration at NASA. The slides don’t really convey the power
of his talk but some of them have interesting facts and quotes (tweeting
astronauts etc). They do a lot of crowd sourcing where they ask the public
(amateur star gazers) to help them identify stars and planets. They have found
that putting scientific questions out into the public domain often provides a
correct answer or solution faster than their scientists could. Watch this
amazing concept
drawing.

·Patrick McCormick, General Manager, Online Collaboration and Citizen Engagement,
Department of Justice Victoria – another great
speaker, this Vic Gov department are also doing fabulous things with social
media and open data. Again some of these slides won’t make much sense without
the commentary but some are interesting. Their internal social media policy
video is a great example of transparency and sharing resources, it is available
on YouTube with many other government departments adapting it for their use.

Andrew Schatz, Senior Lawyer, AGS Media – a lawyers
cautionary words on using web 2.0 and open access to government information. Need to balance risk and benefits.

Rachel Spalding, Assistant Commissioner Policy, Office of the
Australian Information Commissioner – need to balance open access to
information and privacy.